Jemimah replied that where it was failing is a utility application that can be removed from the makefile. Yes indeed, I did that, and it compiled. Then I compiled Midori 0.4.2.

At startup, Midori partly loaded the Google home page, then crashed.

Weird, Midori is loading libraries inside /initrd/pup_rw/usr/lib/ -- that is so incredibly weird, as that is definitely not in the library search path. It must be something peculiar that the 'waf' build system does.

I tried to compile these apps statically against Qt4 and VTE, but failed. Probably it could be figured out. In the latter case there were undefined symbols, but applying what I thought were logical steps to fix it, did not. So, left it and just compiled Gtkterm again shared VTE library. Here are the PETs:

I am pleased to announce the release of Wary Puppy version 5.2.2, our build of Puppy Linux that targets older hardware. This is a minor upgrade and bug-fix release of Wary 5.2. Though, if you look in the release notes you will might not think it so "minor".
This is also the debut of Racy Puppy, which we think of as "Wary on steroids". Racy enhances Wary to run on recent hardware, with Xorg 7.6 and 3.0.7 kernel.

A few days ago ...14th?... I had Wary and Racy at what I thought was release quality. Then I found that 'welcome1stboot' would not start after I had upgraded GTK from 2.24.5 to 2.24.8.

(On the other-hand, other testers reported that welcome1stboot did work.)

So, I played with rolling GTK back to 2.20.1.

But, just now I have discovered why welcome1stboot does not work. I am both relieved and very exasperated.

'welcome1stboot' is written in BaCon. Now, BaCon does not link the GTK libraries as shared libraries in the normal manner. Instead, BaCon has it's own code to load the libraries. This is where the problem occurs -- and it sure is awful, I consider it to be a serious bug in BaCon.

Wary/Racy has these in /usr/lib, where the first is a symlink:
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.2400.5

When the 'devx' is loaded, there is also the symlink:
libgtk-x11-2.0.so

Now this is the awful part: at runtime, the Bacon app tries to load 'libgtk-x11-2.0.so'. It cannot, so crashes. There is no error message identifying the cause of the crash.

It is standard, engraved in stone, practice that *.so files are used during compiling, not at runtime. The BaCon application should really be using libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.

God, I have spent days working on this problem, on the verge of "developer fatigue". Oh well. I will put the *.so symlinks into the gtk PET, and hopefully should be able to put up another Release Candidate of Wary/Racy.

I tried an experiment. Although it was the "wrong" thing to do, I built Wary/Racy 5.2.1.91 with the GTK 2.20.1 PETs from Wary 5.1.x. The reason that it is "wrong" is that the core packages in 5.2.x were recompiled in T2, with GTK 2.24.5 and some later libraries (ex: pixman, cairo, glib). However, as reported, there are problems with GTK 2.24.x. To roll GTK back by just plunking in the PETs from Wary 5.1.x is just asking for trouble.

Or so it would seem. I built it, and everything seems to work. Well, I haven't checked printing, that is one area where there might be some difference between the GTK versions.

Terryphi posted about "tester fatigue". Yes, I am getting "developer fatigue" with these troubles with GTK. I really want to get Wary and Racy 5.2.2 released, then move on to other stuff -- multi-architecture Woof and ARM Puppy. So, give 5.2.1.91 a run, if it looks ok, I'll go with that for the final.

I will be off-line for approximately the next 48 hours, maybe slightly less. Starting from about now. Racy 5.2.1.91 has been uploaded, Wary is still uploading, eta 15 minutes from now:

Yeah, well, now the pendulum has swung the other way. I built Wary and Racy 5.2.1.99, even uploaded them. However, after doing a frugal install, I found that 'welcome1stboot' segfaults.

I recompiled it in Wary 5.2.1.99, it then worked. I used that new executable in Racy 5.2.1.99 ....aaaargh, it still segfaulted!

I regret moving up from GTK 2.20.1. With that version the ROX-Filer focus problem that came in at GTK 2.18.x, was partly fixed. Well, with GTK 2.24.x that "part fix" is gone again.

I wonder if it would break anything if I did roll back to GTK 2.20.1? The problem is, I did a complete compile of all the core packages in T2, against GTK 2.24.5. Rolling GTK back would be asking for trouble.

The guys testing the latest Wary and Racy have reported that large drop-down lists are very slow and hog the CPU. This has been observed in the 'quicksetup', 'bootmanager' and 'remove_builtin' scripts.

I was going to recompile GTK anyway, due to the insert-key-crash bug in SeaMonkey/Firefox. This problem has been reported with recent Wary/Racy, after I upgraded to GTK 2.24.5 (compiled in T2). The bug is documented in an earlier blog post:
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02253

Once again, a big jump in size for the PET, from 1621KB to 2588KB. Once before, I think that I isolated which library was the culprit, then recompiled all the others without debugging, and that worked. Will have to put that on the to-do list.

Anyway, a very pleasant surprise. Running this new GTK, the slowness and CPU-hogging of large drop-down lists has gone away. Now they are snappy. at least this is the case on my laptop.